Where Love Leads
A higher education innovator identifies a surprising element missing in today’s leadership
Over the course of her remarkable career in American higher education, Mary Dana Hinton has accumulated a great store of wisdom, applicable not just to her own field but to all walks of life. Hinton’s unexpected contention in this accessible and uplifting book is that the essential component of all effective leadership is, of all things, love. Part memoir and part leadership theory, Where Love Leads reveals how Hinton’s lived experience as a person from the margins led her to explore and implement love as her guiding principle in leadership practice. Assessing the challenges currently facing higher education, Hinton shows that it is only within a framework of love that one can effectively forge ahead, and she contends that effective leaders of the future will embrace love as their chief compass. For those seeking encouragement, inspiration, and honesty as they struggle to lead in uncertain times, this book offers a practical way forward.
- Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, author of What We Value: Public Health, Social Justice, and Educating for DemocracyAt a time of burgeoning moral distress among higher education leaders, this book makes a distinctive and significant contribution. It offers a road map for the courageous and values-based leadership necessary for confronting increasingly complex challenges, including the existential threat posed by the current attacks on higher education.
- Marjorie Hass, President of the Council of Independent Colleges and author of A Leadership Guide for Women in Higher EducationDr. Hinton’s prophetic voice lifts the spirit and the intellect. She offers a vision of leading with love equal to the current moment and robust enough to help us create a better future. As always, her insights are grounded in her lived experience as a leader. Readers will walk away with admiration for Dr. Hinton's generous spirit and with a new model for leading with integrity and even joy.
- Earl Lewis, founding director of the Center for Social Solutions and professor of history, University of MichiganIn this powerfully important new book, Mary Dana Hinton reminds us that a liberal arts education exposes students and faculty to certain habits of the mind, among them the pursuit of love—of study, self, community, school and nation. In her account, the person who learns to lead from love cannot avoid a kind of transformational inclusion. In a world where the opposite of woke is asleep, she invites us all to love alertly. Bravo!
Mary Dana Hinton is President of Hollins University, President Emerita of the College of Saint Benedict, and the author of Leading from the Margins: College Leadership from Unexpected Places.
